I have been neglecting my journal. Sorry, journal. Why can't i write something incisive here, something telling and indicative of the society I live in blah, blah blah like all those famous bloggers with publishing contracts? Talking of publishing, I'm trying to do that today - get some of my work ready for the publication game. Soul destroying rejection here we come.


Still, it's hard to motivate myself to do anything what with my omnipresent cold, lack of sunlight and, did I mention , cold?

Also,I have been having florid and odd dreams. The most disturbing are the ones I have just I fall asleep - I get into a kind of paralysed state where I am semi awake, but hallucinating. I see disembodied bird wings flapping round my face, a tall, ghostly, incorporeal figure moves gliding towards the bed, a smaller one giggles, OH turns to me kindly, and starts gnawing at my hand like a rat, smiling. Then I try to scream and wake up. OH tells me that he infact keeps the little and large manifestations, the wings etc in the wardrobe. Don't know what they feed on though. Other dreams, which i had this morning were being in the sea where we were being corralled by sharks. And watching a helicopter flying display - only all the helicopters did (these were big square, building like helicopters) was to hover and dart around each other in the air, like gigantic insects). I also had to work in an office that had evidently once been a doctor/butchers office. There was a giant, ceramic sluice in the corner, taking up half the room, stained an ominous blood red at the sloping far end that dropped like a swimming pool floor. There was hair too. I asked to change offices, but the nurse, who was also my assistant just smiles and indicates her name badge.I try to write a report with a grimy black pair of forceps.


What else have I been doing?

Watching the telly
What a season for mindless/not so mindless Tv

There's Desperate Housewives (top show, loving it!), Shameless, and the soon to be beginning the OC, Smallville...


Reading

Have literally just finished, after fighting with OH over the book, Haruki Murakami's latest, kafka on the Shore. It's as surreal as his other work and a little twee in places, but I still liked it. especially the underpinning darkness of the novel and the hints of the uncanny.Plus, with a subplot about people who can talk to cats...
This is my nonsense, top of the head, Murakami poem

Whatever happened to her ?
Too fragile for land,
more suited to splashing.
Someone promised her legs,
but all they did was slit her tail in two
put pebbles on her tongue
for medication

Kept her in the pond
at the bottom of the long garden
at the sanatorium. They played
her singer songwriter guitar, plink plonk --
all music sounds like rain underwater
She complained.

Her psychiatrist recommended
little steps. She wore a pretty blue skirt
and hauled herself out of the water.
Little steps, her legs were limp and thin,
undercooked spaghetti
all the doctors recommended
for her now were violets and
raw fish.

Girls that turned to trees
or shrank to tiny mice
never had these problems.
One lassos the wind and pollen
into her mouth each spring and is
a plump as oak
The other steals the crumbs from
everywhere, making quite a crumbly
sawdust loaf to steal into her mouth.
No one is looking

at the fish girl anymore
but you. Her gills are kiss-like
and her scales flake thumbnail silver.
She swims at the bottom of the green pond
and the green stays in her skin.
Everyone says if she wasn’t a waternymph
She’d be a popsinger, and that
all music
sounds like rain
Underwater.


Also, have just been reading a collection of Chekhov short stories,and I love them.Bizarrely, in places they reminded me of a less hack-like and melodramatic Hardy, well , the Hardy of Jude the Obscure... though Chekhov isn't a tragedian in the same way.

I even had a dream about meeting Chekhov on a Virgin train to London , where he was ensconced.
I wrote a poem about it.

My train furrows across
rape-yellow fields.The land is blasted,
camphor-blue slag heaps spill themselves
across the horizon.At the edges of the cities
slabbread estates will go to rot. Again

the train is late, my book is long but cut up short
and the plastic coffee melts the paper cup,
it scalds my throat. It is a thousand miles perhaps
from bright Yalta to Moscow,

then westwards, to Europa.
The seats become velvet and upholstered,
the carriage plumps with luxury and dust.
This century is consumptive,
the windows grimed with steam breath. I eat coal

In the smoking carriage, Dr Anton Chekhov
converses in odd German with Friedrich Nietzsche.
The latter talks all sturm and drang, destiny --
ash has fallen on his trouser leg

Chekhov is polite, but notices the ash
He’s a microscope with the small things, that’s doctoring
for insight, everything is a symptom. I can tell
he is a little bored. I interrupt, we talk

he tells me tastes, intoxicating purple of berries in vodka,
the pallor of milk soup and I see from the windows,
fading from paragraph to paragraph
his cramped towns, rustle skirted women, bitter orchards
gonetoseed estates, all the Russias

Our parting is a little strange. I adjust my hat,
my veil, shake his dry hand. Anton Chekhov will notice
my cold fingers and how I look away.
All our lives are intersected and yet
solitary, like this train line

At a southern station in a foundry town
is my stop. You’re there to meet me,
we kiss, for we’ve been parted .My coffee
has gone cold in my cup. My book is splashed with coffee.
This ending is not what we expected.


Lastly, I have yet to see Team America, but the description about how the eponymous puppets manage to destroy world famous landmarks while 'saving the world' couldn't help but remind me forecefully of the US accidental / stupid wrecking of Babylon. Babylon that has been in ruins,a cradle of civilization for millennia, yet no nation or war has managed to obliterate it. Until now. Using the defence of complete ignorance/stupidity and the fact that 'hey man, they were ruins already!', the US army has managed o detroy vital archaeological remains, and bundle priceless bits or stone, pottery etc in with contaminated dirt to make sandbags.Well done Team America!!

Also, in the local paper, stories like how a local resident was sort of staying somewhere near the disaster zones in thailand, and had they been there a week later might have got caught up in the tsunami are front page news. Meanwhile, there has been flooding in britain and a goldfish was found flopping by the goalmouth on a football pitch when the waters receded. Billy the Fish. Is all this caused by the phenomena known as 'global dimming'?

I watched a programme on this last week on respectable old BBC2. According to this programme, the theory seems to have been propagated by an old codger measuring light readings twice in 25 years and by a pair of aussie scientists who measured water evaporating out of pans. Apparently, evaporation has to do with photons 'kicking the water out of the pan'. Thanks, mr scientists. The way the documentary was shot was so heavy handed it reminded me of spoof news programme 'Brass Eye'. There was ominous music, newsy graphics, 'action shots' of nerds looking for scientific documents (never an easy task to make science look sexy or exciting). Gloom-laden prediction followed gloom laden prediction. We were told of a myserious 'culprit' who lay behind evils such as famine in Africa.I was expecting an international evil genius baddie a la Dr Evil, or Blofeld. No, sadly the culprit was 'pollution'. Then , disappointingly, they didn'tt dress up an actor as 'pollution' in a grimy grey cloak with a beckoning finger and an evil laugh.They did however, ram their point home with shots of coffins. Lots of coffins. Sadly, it also seems that keeping up pollution that leads to 'global dimming',and cools the earth is not a viable way to counteract 'global warming'. Damn. That would have been so easy.

Shock revelation followed shock revelation. They showed warmed methane bubbling from the depths of the ocean - I half expected them to make this affect the balance of the tectonic plates, affecting the earth's core, throwing the planet off orbit , altering its magnetic field and making it an asteroid-magnet - kaboom! Not since I watched another disastermoviedocumentary about the imminent likelihood of the geyser under Jellystone park erupting (it does this every whatever million years apart and is like, a thousand years overdue --- run away!!) have i felt so deliberately panicked.Where was Bruce Willis to drill a hole, Gene hackman, Robert wagner to be revealed as the person who caused the whole sorry mess in the first place, Jeff Goldblum to waffle on and someone to shout 'Goddam you global dimming, you took my family and I hate you'?

I'm not knocking the idea of global dimming here, rather the way that this programme was made: sensationalist, lazy science, half explained ideas. And really, it isn't people like us that need to take heed so much , as governments.And sadly, this kind of thing doesn't keep them awake at night.

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